Every comedy has a tragedy at its heart, and every movie worth reviewing has a message to sell. Iron Sky, the "Nazis on the Moon" farce in theaters, is no different.

At its heart, Iron Sky is a serious meditiation about the values that make people humane, about Dieselpunk values vs. Cyberpunk values, and about the banality of power.

Like all such comedies of small people caught in the middle of massive power, in the end great personal barriers are surmounted over the awareness that those very barriers are irrelevant, even harmful, when faced with the real threats to one's beliefs and values. The heroine of the film, despite having been born in the mid-1970s and brought up in the Nazi Moonbase, is convinced that the Reich was unfairly pushed off the Earth because it's message of "healing humanity" was somehow too much for the evil Alliance. She learns of the Reich's real message when she visits Earth, and from there her own character growth emerges.

The Nazis are still Dieselpunk fifty years on. They have a primitive form of fusion power, but their computers are still the size of rooms and their anti-grav involves massive machines with giant chains and pistons-- and the idea is that both the huge scale of their flying saucers, and the minescule eggshell scale of the world's space force, are both inappropriate for human beings. Human muscles cannot power the first; human minds cannot comprehend the computers at the heart of the second. The film closes on the heroine determined to rebuild along her ideals, but the problem of scale remains.